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BANGALORE/DELHI: Nandan Nilekani on Thursday ended a long innings with Infosys Technologies, the IT bellwether he helped found 28 years ago and nurtured to become one of corporate India���s proudest names, after being hand-picked by the prime minister to head an ambitious project to provide every citizen with a unique national ID by 2011.

���I was humbled by the invitation from the prime minister,��� he told ET. The story was broken by ET NOW early on Thursday afternoon.

Soon after he was named chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI), a post that carries the rank of cabinet minister, Mr Nilekani resigned as the co-chairman of the board of directors in Infosys.

His long-time colleague and Infosys chief mentor NR Narayana Murthy said the company would accept Mr Nilekani���s absence with a sense of duty to a larger cause.

���We are glad that an extraordinary individual like Nandan has got an opportunity to add value to India through this position,��� Mr Murthy said. In his new role, Mr Nilekani is tasked with rolling out a pilot project during the next six months for the UIAI, established under the aegis of Planning Commission in January 2009.

Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said he was looking forward on having Mr Nilekani on board. ���Am absolutely delighted... it is a terrific choice. I can���t think of anyone better than Nandan to head the project,��� he said.

The move, widely lauded by corporate India, is seen as a first step in infusing professional expertise into the working of the state machinery. ���Nandan is not new to this. He���s been a public policy expert and I feel he is an absolute fine choice to be leading such project. It���s good to see the government starting to look at people from private sector to lead these initiatives,��� said Dr Pankaj Chandra, director of IIM Bangalore.

A few years ago, Mr Nilekani had co-founded and chaired the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), which got embroiled in a political tug-of-war, leading to his resignation.

���Nandan was very passionate about BATF, unfortunately the project could not sustain because of the change of government and other political reasons. He was really saddened by the project going nowhere because of a lack of political will,��� said a former member of BATF who didn���t want to be named.

The UID project is a top priority for the UPA government, as reiterated in the President���s address to the inaugural session of the 15th Lok Sabha. An initial kitty of Rs 100 crore was earmarked for the project in the interim budget presented by Mr Pranab Mukherjee in February this year. ���It aims at eliminating the need for multiple identification mechanism prevalent across various government departments,��� he had said in his budget speech.

Besides addressing security concerns, the UID project will over-haul and direct the delivery mechanism for public goods and services to intended beneficiaries. The project also means orders worth crores being rolled out to top IT firms including Infosys, Wipro and TCS. It also signifies a big leap in e-governance and a big leg-up for national security.

���It will make absolutely sure that you cannot have one person with two different cards, and you cannot have two different people with the same name because the biometrics identity will make that impossible,��� Plan panel���s Mr Ahluwalia said.

UIAI also seeks to eliminate wastage and leakage of official subsidies by overhauling the entire subsidy system from subsidising products and services to direct transfer of the subsidy or welfare payment to the target beneficiary.

In his book ���Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century��� published in November last year, Mr Nilekani had devoted a chapter to how IT can help transform a nation. Nilekani also chaired a task force on invitation of minister of state for power Jairam Ramesh last year, which looked at how power companies in the country can leverage IT to become more efficient.